Vanity Fair's Women on Women

by Radhika Jones

  By the time Steinem hit her early fifties, however, some genuine problems had begun to surface, converging like so many express trains hurtling toward a collision: the frustration of her failure to produce a real book; the lifelong pattern of hopping from one man to another, which finally led her into a major romantic debacle; the critical lack of self-esteem, so carefully papered over for so long; and finally the shadow that stalks us all, manifesting itself this time as breast cancer. And as the crisis swelled to its climax, the ever present Greek chorus keened its “I-told-you-so”s with obscene glee.

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  Nobody seems to know for sure how it all began. Perhaps it was an inevitable corollary to Steinem’s much-gossiped-about decision to get involved with Mort Zuckerman in the first place. Many of her friends were appalled; even then, back in the mid-eighties, the controversial real-estate developer was hardly beloved in liberal and feminist circles, and he has become less popular since. Zuckerman had only recently moved from Boston to New York, and cynical observers speculated that his sudden passion for Gloria Steinem had as much to do with her enviable social cachet and universal entrée as it did with a deeply felt commitment to her. But any dismay over Steinem’s new romance was eclipsed by the fire storm of criticism that erupted when The Rumor That Ate New York burst onto the scene. Suddenly you couldn’t go to a dinner party without hearing it: that the unattainable Gloria Steinem, the woman whose previous admirers had ranged from Mike Nichols to John Kenneth Galbraith, who had left an endless trail of disappointed suitors in her wake, the rich and the powerful and the famous littering her path like so much debris—that glorious Gloria had fallen at last, and not only fallen but humiliated herself, betraying the women’s movement in the bargain.

  Specifically, The Rumor held that Zuckerman, a perennial bachelor who never quite seems to make it to the altar, had promised he’d marry her if she could have his child, and that Steinem, already past fifty, was ricocheting from one fertility specialist to another in a desperate last-ditch attempt to land Mr. Moneybags. The Rumor was astonishing in its virulence, its pervasiveness, and the total certitude with which so many people instantly embraced it; everyone claimed they knew it was true because a friend of a friend had seen Gloria in some doctor’s office. As it happened, the doctors Steinem was seeing during that period were cancer specialists, but no matter. The fact that she had spent her entire adult life politely responding to unending questions by saying she wasn’t interested in getting married or in having children meant nothing. Trashing her became the favorite spectator sport of the smart set. For all those who had long hoped that Saint Gloria would turn out to be guilty of the hypocrisy and venality they had always suspected but never been able to prove, that period provided an undreamed-of bonanza; so much venom spewed forth on the island of Manhattan it’s a wonder it didn’t poison the water supply. By the time the talk died down, The Rumor had been accepted as historical fact by all but a few of her closest friends, and to question it publicly meant being dismissed as a foolish and naïve idealist who simply didn’t know the score.

  Typically, Steinem is philosophical in analyzing the reasons it happened, and her emotional reaction seems restrained. “It hurt my feelings,” she acknowledges mildly. “It made it seem like I would suddenly want to do something I had shown no evidence in my life of wanting to do, just because of what some man wanted me to do.” When I press her about whether she has ever sought out fertility specialists, she says firmly, “Absolutely, unequivocally not. I have never gone to a fertility doctor in my life.” So why did The Rumor assume such proportions? In part, Steinem sees it as a function of Zuckerman’s own reputation. “He has spent all of his adult life going around saying he wants to have a child, so whoever he goes out with is subject to this rumor,” she says dryly. “What is hurtful about it is the assumption that women are so without their own power that they will do anything to marry a powerful man. I mean, I never even moved in with him, which was a bone of contention. Even at my lowest point, which was pretty tired and depressed, I didn’t want to get married.” [In 2000, Steinem would marry the British entrepreneur and environmentalist David Bale, who passed away in 2003.]

  Steinem also points out the extent to which people’s perceptions reflected the presumption of the female’s lack of power in any equation. “If you see a man and a woman together whom you know disagree, the assumption is she’s losing,” Steinem says. “Well, maybe she’s winning, or subverting, or spying, or humanizing!” Or trying to, anyway.

  There are those who believe that Zuckerman himself may inadvertently have started The Rumor. Mutual acquaintances remember his talking hopefully about the possibility that Gloria might have his child. If he got the wrong idea, Steinem herself takes part of the blame. “I never had the nerve to look him in the eye and say, ‘Even if I could do this, I wouldn’t, so forget it, it’s out of the question,’” she admits.

  Zuckerman goes ballistic when asked about the whole subject. “I don’t want to get into any discussion on any level,” he says angrily. However, asked about whether Gloria ever saw fertility doctors because he had held out a promise of marriage, he does say, “Both parts of that are completely false. It’s totally untrue.” His current line on Gloria is eulogistic: “She’s a wonderful woman. She may be the most brilliant person I’ve ever known in my life, one of the wittiest and one of the most dedicated to her values and beliefs, a fabulous woman who has given her whole life over to her principles and ideals. I have the most enormous admiration for her.” Later, Gloria reports that after his conversation with me, Zuckerman immediately telephoned her “to gloat” over the idea that anyone might believe she had wanted to marry him. To her mind, they are no longer friendly; indeed, she generally looks as if she smelled something putrid whenever his name arises, although she tries to be diplomatic. “In a real sense, we were never friends, so we’re not friends now,” she says carefully. “It isn’t that we dislike each other, but we don’t have anything in common.”

  In Revolution from Within, Steinem actually takes on the Mort Question, although she doesn’t identify him by name; while the tone of her account is neither defensive nor self-justifying, she clearly felt the need to address why she had fallen in love with “someone so obviously wrong for me,” a judgment she illustrates with a slyly telling series of contrasts between his values and her own. Steinem attributes much of her initial attraction to Zuckerman to her particular vulnerability during that period, a time of “exhaustion and living on the edge,” of “falling off the treadmill into bed only to get back on it the next day.” When she arrived in New York at the airport late one night to find that her eager new swain had sent a car to pick her up, she writes, “its shelter loomed out of all proportion.” Moreover, Zuckerman professed to be miserable with his life, thereby activating her Florence Nightingale instincts, not to mention the thought of how much happier he would be if he dedicated his resources to the causes she championed so passionately.

  “So I reverted to a primordial skill that I hadn’t used since feminism had helped me to make my own life: getting a man to fall in love with me,” she reports. “As many women can testify, this is alarmingly easy providing you’re willing to play down who you are and play up who he wants you to be. In this case, I was aided by my travel and his work and social schedule that left us with little time to find out how very different we were. And also by something I didn’t want to admit: a burn-out and an erosion of self so deep that outcroppings of a scared sixteen-year-old had begun to show through. . . . I had lost so much energy and hope that I was reexperiencing romantic rescue fantasies that had been forgotten long ago. The only problem was that, having got this man to fall in love with an inauthentic me, I had to keep on not being myself.” It took her a long time to acknowledge that the situation was impossible, although she and Zuckerman give different accounts of how long they were involved: she says two years, he says four.

  Zuckerma
n’s money was the source of the other charge frequently leveled against her during that period—that after thirty years of turning down an endless parade of successful men, Steinem had suddenly metamorphosed into a gold digger. She doesn’t deny that his financial assets were part of the appeal, although she was often embarrassed by his ostentatiousness. “I devoted most of my time to trying to get him to drive a van instead of a limousine,” she says wryly. Perhaps so, although it often seemed to others that she was enjoying the helicopters and the servants and the assorted other perks of the super-rich. “It wasn’t the money per se,” she explains, “and it wasn’t so much for myself as the idea that he could help the multitudes of causes that need that money—and possibly the magazine, although it was much harder for me to ask for something that was so closely associated with me.” And did Zuckerman help Ms. magazine, which Steinem spent sixteen years trying desperately to keep alive before it was finally sold in 1987? “No,” she says sourly. Nevertheless, the thought that “he could do a great deal of good with his power” remained tantalizing until the bitter end. And the end was bitter, at least for her, although Zuckerman seems to hang on to rosier memories; indeed, he still has a picture of Gloria in his bedroom, where all the other pictures are of himself. “In a way, I guess I was feeling as if, if I could change him, I could change the whole patriarchy,” she says sadly.

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  The sun is not yet up on a dark November morning when a slight figure hurries out of her apartment to hail a taxi to the airport. Within the next few hours, many of her Upper East Side neighbors will be heading out for a leisurely Saturday brunch and a day of recreation, but Gloria Steinem has to catch a 6:45 A.M. flight to Saskatchewan to speak to a women’s network about international feminism. Even now, with sixty in sight, her magazine in other hands, and the entire culture conspiring to convince women that the women’s movement is dead, Steinem’s commitment to changing the patriarchy shows no sign whatsoever of flagging.

  She isn’t even discouraged. Yes, the Clarence Thomas hearings [which preceded the Senate’s confirmation of Thomas as a Supreme Court justice despite accusations of sexual misconduct, which he denied] were depressing, but sexual harassment didn’t even exist as a defined problem until the last few years. “Sexual harassment is where rape was as an issue fifteen years ago,” Steinem says confidently, “and sexual-harassment complaints are up 500 percent since the hearings.” And besides, the reaction to the hearings has been extraordinary. “I’ve never seen anything like the outpouring of anger,” she exclaims. “People come up to you in airports; they say, ‘What can we do—it’s so terrible! Why didn’t anyone believe Anita Hill? We’ve got to get rid of these guys in Congress!’”

  Indeed, Gloria Steinem is the last person you could convince that the women’s movement was dead. “Ever since the movement began, it’s been being declared dead,” she says. “The first headline to that effect was in 1969, and there have been multitudes forever after. The backlash is there, and it may succeed, but it is because the movement is strong that there is a backlash. There used to be an identifiable band of twelve feminists, so the media knew where to go. Now it’s everywhere—inside the Modern Language Association, the American Psychiatric Association, in caucuses in the Newspaper Guild.

  “This is a democracy, so there’s an assumption that Reagan or Bush represents the country. But if you look at the polls, the issues Reagan and Bush stand for are not the majority issues. If you measure things in the only way this country seems to provide us to measure, which is public-opinion polls, there’s been a fairly steady growth in support for feminist issues, although that goes contrary to popular wisdom. One of the things I find so frustrating is the fact that you turn on the television set and nine-tenths of the national news is about so-called women’s issues. There’s battered children, domestic violence, sexual harassment, rape, sexual abuse of children, Teddy Kennedy and his apology in Cambridge, the critique of the Senate and its unresponsive nature, the defection of major contributors from the Republican Party, the fact that health and pro-choice issues provided the margin of victory for Harris Wofford’s Senate race against Dick Thornburgh in Pennsylvania—but none of it is associated with the women’s movement. The women’s movement is alive and well; it’s just not being called the women’s movement.” She sighs. “It’s not conscious; it’s beyond conspiracy. It’s a definitional problem, a cultural drift, two-thirds of which is underwater. But it’s very dangerous. I keep thinking of the sentence in college textbooks about how women were ‘given’ the vote, a phrase which ignored 150 years of struggle and hunger strikes. The changes are there, but unless we know how the changes got made, we won’t know how to continue.”

  And so Gloria Steinem never stops talking about how the changes get made. She may have come late to feminism, but once she finally got the picture, she never lost sight of it again. She is the first to admit she was slow to catch on. “Until I was into my thirties I was stoutly maintaining I had not been discriminated against,” she says with regret. “There was a well of anger so deep I just did not want to talk about it. I had difficulty renting an apartment, because if I was a single woman I wasn’t financially reliable and if I was financially reliable I must be a call girl. I was having an almost impossible time getting serious journalistic assignments. I was certainly dealing with what we now call sexual harassment—but it was all so bad I just displaced it. I identified with every other group that was being discriminated against—the farm workers, the civil-rights movement—rather than other women in my situation.”

  And when she did finally jump on the bandwagon, she immediately became a target. After all, in those days Steinem was best known professionally for having worked as a Playboy Bunny and then written about it, and her personal reputation was that of the femme fatale every man in New York seemed to be in love with—“the intellectuals’ pinup,” as Esquire magazine called her in a snide 1971 profile, the woman “who advanced in public favor by appealing to powerful men.” Her sudden emergence as a spokesperson for the women’s movement proved especially galling to its putative author, Betty Friedan—particularly because, as Muriel Fox recalled in The Sisterhood, Marcia Cohen’s history of the movement, “the minute Gloria came on the scene, the media dropped Betty like a hot potato.” The fallout was ugly: by 1972, Friedan was denouncing Gloria for “ripping off the movement for private profit,” by which she apparently meant fame rather than money, since Steinem donated at least 50 percent of her speaking fees to women’s causes or to Ms. magazine, something Friedan didn’t do, according to The Sisterhood. Steinem had never been part of the organized women’s movement, Friedan claimed angrily: “The media tried to make her a celebrity, but no one should mistake her for a leader.”

  Other feminists cringed at the public discord, and even those who were loath to take sides were dismayed by the malignancy of the attacks on Steinem. “It is probably too easy to go on about the two of them this way—Betty as Wicked Witch of the West, Gloria as Ozma, Glinda, Dorothy—take your pick,” Nora Ephron wrote in Esquire. “To talk this way ignores the subtleties, right? Gloria is not, after all, uninterested in power. . . . Still, it is hard to come out anywhere but squarely on her side. Betty Friedan, in her thoroughly irrational hatred of Steinem, has ceased caring whether or not the effects of that hatred are good or bad for the women’s movement.” Upset by such characterizations, Friedan vehemently denied “that I was jealous of Gloria because she was blonde and pretty and I was not,” but she could never resist getting in another dig. “I was no match for her, not only because of that matter of looks—which somehow paralyzed me—but because I don’t know how to manipulate,” Friedan wrote piously.

  Among those who knew her well, Steinem’s conversion to feminism came as no surprise at all. “She’d always been very politically concerned; a sense of justice and a clear political stance had always been very central to her,” says Robert Benton, the film director, who dated S
teinem in the early 1960s. “She’d been very involved in civil rights, and the women’s movement is another form of civil rights, so it was perfectly consistent. But because Gloria has always been extraordinarily glamorous, I think people were surprised that somebody like that would be a feminist, because everyone misunderstood feminism then.”

  But there was more to it than that. On some level, Gloria has always made other people feel guilty for being manifestly less perfect themselves; her very existence constitutes a reproach. “If I told her about a disastrous love affair, she told me about the cultural and social strains that had broken it up,” Liz Smith complained humorously in 1971. “It’s like getting a message from Gandhi. . . . Gloria has all the irritating qualities of a saint—she is a rebuke.” Twenty years later, Smith’s perception hasn’t changed. “Gloria is sort of like the Mona Lisa, and the Mona Lisa is a really infuriating portrait,” Smith observes. “That enigmatic little smile, that perfection! I think most of us perceive that Gloria is a better person than we are, and as I said back then, saints are really irritating. She is a really good person who just has not lived up to everyone else’s venal ideals. She’s true to herself, but she’s ended up absolutely nowhere. She hasn’t really done anything for herself, not even in what I consider would have been her own best interest. She’s never taken advantage of anything, she has remained in that same little apartment, she doesn’t have cars—how much of an opportunist ends up with virtually nothing?”

  Steinem’s unfailing political correctness irked people as well. She has always maintained that Ms. magazine had a hard time because advertisers wouldn’t support it; as usual, patriarchy was the problem. Even among other feminists, this didn’t necessarily seem to be the whole story. “Why did Ms. fail?” says one prominent female journalist who wrote for the magazine. “Because they had a hideously boring magazine no one could read. That’s why it was not successful—it was a goddamn bore.”